From left, Jared Abrahamson, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, and Barry Keoghan in American Animals (The Orchard)

 Writer-director Bart Layton’s American Animals is the retelling of the 2004 heist of rare books from the special collections at Transylvania University in Lexington, KY. Only this retelling has a twist: it cuts between the narrative, where the real-life people are portrayed by actors, and interviews with the perpetrators themselves.

The “Transy Book Heist” was committed by four men in their early 20s: Warren Lipka, the ringleader (played by American Horror Story’s Evan Peters); Spencer Reinhard, who came up with the idea (The Killing of a Sacred Deer’s Barry Keoghan); Eric Borsuk (Jared Abrahamson from TV’s Travelers); and Chas Allen (Everybody Wants Some!!’s Blake Jenner), all white, all from privileged backgrounds, none of whom had ever been in serious trouble before. Fueled by weed, booze, and suburban ennui, they blundered their way through the heist and the subsequent attempt to have the rare books they stole appraised and sold on the black market. The young men were swiftly caught, tried, and jailed in federal prison for seven years.

The adult men, now all released from prison, have restarted their lives. They look back on their crimes through the lens of maturity and—save for one major aspect—they don’t seem to have a bit of regret. To them, they broke out of the malaise of suburban life and the lives their parents had and their peers would go on to have, which they did not want for themselves. To borrow from John Falk’s Vanity Fair article, they saw the benefit of either getting away with the crime or being caught. In either scenario, this plan was a way of escaping from their lives of boredom.

Responsible for the 2012 documentary The Imposter as well as directing the Locked Up Abroad TV movie and series, British director Layton sprinkles his first narrative film with inventiveness. The surreal aspects begin with Spencer and Warren’s having trouble remembering specific details of the conversations in 2003 that led to the idea for the heist—Were they smoking a joint while driving around when Spence first told Warren about the special collections, or were they smoking a joint on the back porch of their friend’s house?—which throws their reliability as narrators into question.

Once the film steps into the second and third acts, Layton ramps these surreal moments through the film’s genuine voice, which is the boys’ vernacular, namely the fact that they pieced together their plan by bingeing on heist films such as Ocean’s Eleven and Matchstick Men. They even go as far as giving themselves the color-based nicknames from Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. This allows Layton to create a scene in which the boys’ idealized version of the heist takes place: all of them in sleek black suits, moving with balletic precision, played out to Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation,” just like in one of the “Ocean’s” or “The Matrix” films.

American Animals deserves to be on the best-of list of recent heist films. This is thanks to the performances by the young cast, but a review would not be complete without singling out Layton’s documentary sensibilities kicking in and remaining respectful to the one victim (besides the boys’ letdown parents) in the heist—the special collections librarian Betty Jean Gooch, played here by The Handmaid’s Tale’s Ann Dowd.

In order for the heist to work, Gooch had to be immobilized. None of the boys wanted to be the one to do it, and they even brainstormed ways to pull the theft off without her having to be there, but because she guarded the keys to the cases the books were in, there was simply no way around the need for her to be present. When the assault finally happens, it is an unnerving and a surprising tonal shift from what had, up until that moment, been a stoner comedy. In essence, it is the fulcrum around which the entire film is tethered. Dowd’s performance during the attack is downright devastating.

Perhaps the only element that prevents American Animals from becoming a great film is its lack of place. Most of it is set in Kentucky, but aside from some brief scenes early on when Spencer and Warren are driving around getting stoned, there’s not really much to distinguish what growing up a Kentuckian meant to these guys. Layton’s script doesn’t strive to pick up on the eccentricities of the region in the way a native-born director might have.

It is surprising how many of the real-life people appear in the movie, although at times the interviews do feel scripted. Particularly effective are the shots of the parents’ interviews, which are filmed in wide shots to reveal the interiors and exteriors of their houses, to leave no doubt of the boys’ upper-middle-class upbringings.

Although the specifics to the men’s backgrounds are lacking, the film does nail the why of the crime. During the investigation, there were many theories about the boys needing money, but it boiled down to simply wanting to do something to shatter the norm. Reinhard was in a good school and had a promising future as an artist. Lipka was on a sports scholarship (the film never states which sport). Borsuk had plans to join the FBI. Allen had been an entrepreneur since he was 12 and was not hurting for money. At the end of the day, the young men did it as a cure for boredom, and now they are the subject of a film that is anything but boring.